Mission: To build a better electric car
Assets: Over $1 million in revenue and orders since 2009 from $1.6 million in venture capital raised to date
Yield: A client roster that includes Burlington Hydro, the City of Santa Monica and the US Army
By Noa Glouberman
It hasn’t always been about cars, green or not, for Jay Giraud.
Much of the Rapid Electric Vehicles Inc. (REV) founder and CEO’s early adult life was spent competing internationally as a pro snowboarder.
“When I was 19 I managed a couple of coffee shops; that’s where I found out how much I loved business,” said Giraud from his newly expanded East Vancouver office and showroom.
“I’d get to the mall where I was working, look up at the mountains and cringe because I had to go indoors. I figured, I have my whole life to do business, so I better move to Whistler now.”
Move he did, quickly amassing 11 sponsors and a top 100 world half-pipe ranking. But when a 2002 injury stopped him in his tracks, Giraud’s attention turned to a problem he’d been mulling over for some time: energy.
“I was working at a bar with the TV on all day, watching the whole bombing of Baghdad happen,” he said. “It seemed like the war in Iraq was all about us trying to get their oil just so we could run our cars.”
The 35-year-old admits his interest in electric vehicles (EVs) pre-dates snowboarding, and that “a few pivotal pieces of information collected along the way” led him to heading a company that counts Burlington Hydro, the City of Santa Monica and the US Army among its clients. The path from landing tricks to converting gas-guzzlers to 100% electric began when Giraud noticed his older brother race remote-control electric cars in their North Vancouver home.
“They looked like miniature versions of the cars my parents drove; both had long antennas so, to five-year-old me, that meant both ran on electricity.”
He also remembers studying Nikola Tesla’s theories on wireless power transmission in Grade 8; in Grade 10 auto mechanics, Giraud discovered that a gas engine is 25% efficient at best.
“I couldn’t believe it; you go to a gas station, throw down $60, and 45 of those dollars isn’t even moving the car. I knew there had to be a better way.”
Still, once his snowboarding career ended, Giraud put his frustrations with the automotive industry on hold, instead going on to co-found a clothing company and, later, sell motorbikes.
Finding “some way of improving the environment,” however, continued to weigh heavily on his mind.
“There’s never a really good time to do what you need to do, except for now,” he said. “If you have the seed of the thought, then it’s your responsibility. It doesn’t matter your background, your experience, your education – it’s your idea. It’s up to you to make it happen.”
With his family’s support, Giraud quit his sales job in December 2007 to write a business plan for an electric car company. In January, he attended a Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association meeting, where he met Geoff Davenport.
“I was really impressed with Jay right away,” said Davenport, a former REV director who is now vice-president, business development, at Burnaby’s Alpha Technologies Inc. “He had so much enthusiasm and passion and confidence for EVs; he really struck me as someone who had a strong vision and the ability to take it all the way.”
For all of his confidence, Giraud – whose original plan was to distribute other companies’ EVs through a Canadian network of dealers – was disappointed by the market offerings at the time.
“We were hearing a lot about low-speed vehicles [LSVs], which are basically electric golf carts with roofs, usually imported from China, that don’t meet regular crash certification,” he said. “To be allowed regular road privileges, LSVs can’t break a maximum speed of 40 kilometres an hour – 10 less than regular city limits. So there was a disconnect there.”
He also felt that “legitimate” car companies were “years away from offering a 100%-electric product.” He quickly realized that, in order to sell the kind of car he wanted to see replace gas-dependant vehicles, he’d have to build it himself.
But who would buy?
Giraud’s research indicated 16.7 million passenger fleet vehicles on the road in North America alone, with Ford Motor Co. “dominating in government fleet organizations with its light-duty SUV … so that became the platform we’d need to convert to electric.”
He started raising angel money to fuel his plan, but his big break came at the Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose, where he shared his vision with an audience of 700 delegates.
“If you don’t tell people what you’re going to do, you don’t get any pull,” he said. “Sometimes you just need to say it, even without knowing how you’re going to do it. That way you put your reputation on the line and, by being committed … you end up finding a way.”
One of the delegates present that day was Intel Corp. founder Andy Grove. Liking what he heard, Grove approached Giraud after his pitch.
“He said, ‘You need to convert 10 million cars in four years,’” Giraud recalled. “He had this big speech about the need to save the U.S. from its energy problems; he said the fastest way to do that is to deal with existing cars because displacing them with new ones would take too long.”
Grove subsequently opened “a few doors” for REV, which, in part, helped position the company as an emerging leader in the EV space. Barely three years in the making, REV takes Ford SUVs, removes their internal-combustion engines and related drive and fuel components – leaving the original driving characteristics intact – and installs high-performance lithium battery packs, an electric motor and other power electronics in their wake.
The result: EVs with zero emissions, faster acceleration, increased horsepower and improved safety systems. But Giraud is taking the idea of automotive electrification a step further, building EVs that can store and redistribute energy back to the electrical grid. REV’s “bi-directional” wireless technology allows each car to “communicate” with the grid when it’s plugged in. As such, the utility can draw energy off the vehicle’s idle battery if needed.
“Imagine we have a brief blackout and a building needs power because it’s running critical equipment,” he explained. “The EVs that are … plugged into that building can power that entire building to ride out that power outage.”
With expected orders of 200-plus vehicles from the North American construction, utility, military and municipal sectors this year, Giraud plans to scale production beyond 15,000 vehicles through 2014.
“You know, whenever you’re flying, you just look down over those warehouses around an airport and you can see medium- and heavy-duty trucks sitting, hundreds of them in a row?” Giraud asked. “Every one of those vehicles, if they were electric, could back up the buildings and … the grid. We’d be dealing with literally gigawatt hours of energy storage that would increase the efficiency and reliability of our grid, and of society in general.”